DevOps companies: cooperate or not?

During last years DevOps has become a required part for the business improvement. DevOps companies provide DevOps-as-a-Service and can highly increase the efficiency of your processes. Do you really need to implement DevOps? Can you do it with in-house specialists or need to outsource this part of the business? Today we’ll answer these questions.

If you read this, you might have a business tied up with the IT sector and look for ways of business development. Well, DevOps methodology is really an answer. What’s the DevOps in simple words? DevOps is a methodology for simplifying and automating the software deployment process. The main principle of DevOps is to make CI/CD pipelines. This means Continuous Integration and Delivery. As a result of DevOps transformation you’ll receive:

faster time-to-market;

increased workflow efficiency;

coherency in the team;

cost-reduction;

reliability and security of the product.

CD/CD pipeline allows reorganizing the software development process. There is a common problem in the standard approach to software development. Team of the specialists needs to give each other parts of code for testing and deployment. Thus, there are a lot of pauses and inconveniences. As a result, the product goes to the market very slowly and the situation with the updates is the same. Also, each IT specialist needs to do a lot of repetitive work. DevOps methodology helps to automate routine work. For example, before the DevOps introduction, the software development department needed to ask IT operations for deploying and testing the project on the customized environment. This is a very long and laborious way.

DevOps makes software development more efficient. DevOps engineer writes special manifests for designing the environment. A developer can change environment parameters in the manifest and run the application in needed conditions. Such an approach significantly saves the time of all the teams involved in the development.

Also, automatization allows the security increase because of using strict standards and policies. Your data will mostly be stored in the cloud in an encrypted form. This also provides the safety of the whole project.

How does it work?

Well, we’ve described what you’ll have with DevOps implementation. Let’s move to the technical part. DevOps transformation is quite a complex process, so we will describe it superficially.

DevOps lifecycle includes the next components:

Continuous Integration. This step provides continuous improvement of the software. Developers writes code in a small butches and tests it immediately, so development process becomes faster.

Continuous Testing. Providing continuous improvement is possible because of testing. New blocks of code need to pass tests before the next stages. Thus, the DevOps methodology implements automated testing for reducing the development time.

Continuous Deployment. DevOps allows making releases as fast as possible. Thus, after Integration and Testing, you can deploy the software and deliver it to the customer.

Continuous Monitoring. All we’ve described above, stable IT operations are impossible without continuous monitoring and logging. Full-time monitoring allows to find and solve errors during the project lifecycle.

DevOps methodology automates these processes and puts them into a continuous cycle. As a result, you have incredible development efficiency.

How to cooperate with the DevOps company?

Now you have an understanding of the DevOps transformation and might ask, how to implement it to your business. The common way to receive DevOps consulting services is by referring to an experienced Managed Service Provider (MSP). Such companies provide a dedicated team for implementing DevOps into your workflow.

Of course, you can hire such a team in-house, but this is a very long and inefficient way. You need to maintain the team and pay salaries even when DevOps transformation will be done. There is only one reason to do it — if you want to implement DevOps and after that outsource your team, thus said, if you want to turn your company into a Managed Service Provider. In other cases, hiring a dedicated team is the best approach to the DevOps transformation.

So, the answer to a title question is to cooperate. With qualified MSP your business will prosper and your internal processes will much better and efficient.